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Of Jewish descent, Dunayevskaya was born Raya Shpigel in today's Ukraine and emigrated to the United States (her name changed to Rae Spiegel) and joined the revolutionary movement in her childhood. Active in the American Communist Party youth organization, she was expelled at age 18 and thrown down a flight of stairs when she suggested that her local comrades should find out Trotsky's response to his expulsion from the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. By the following year she found a group of independent Trotskyists in Boston, led by Antoinette Buchholz Konikow, an advocate of birth control and legal abortion.[1] In the 1930s, she adopted her mother's maiden name Dunayevskaya.[2]

Without getting permission from the U.S. Trotskyist organization, she went to Mexico in 1937 to serve as Leon Trotsky's Russian language secretary during his exile there.[1] Having returned to Chicago in 1938 after the deaths of her father and brother, she broke with Trotsky in 1939 when he continued to maintain that the Soviet Union was a "workers' state" even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. She opposed any notion that workers should be asked to defend this "workers' state" allied with Nazi Germany in a world war. Along with theorists such as C.L.R. James, and later Tony Cliff, Dunayevskaya argued that the Soviet Union had become 'state capitalist'. Toward the end of her life, she stated that what she called "my real development" only began after her break with Trotsky.[3]

Differences within the WP steadily widened, and in 1947, after a brief period of independent existence during which they published a series of documents, the tendency returned to the ranks of the SWP. Their membership in the SWP was based on a shared insistence that there was a pre-revolutionary situation just around the corner, and the shared belief that a Leninist party must be in place to take advantage of the coming opportunities.

By 1951, with the failure of their shared perspective to materialize, the tendency developed a theory that rejected Leninism and saw the workers as being spontaneously revolutionary. This was borne out for them by the 1949 U.S. miners' strike. In later years, they were to pay close attention to automation, especially in the automobile industry, which they came to see as paradigmatic of a new stage of capitalism. This led to the tendency leaving the SWP again to begin independent work.

After more than a decade of developing the theory of state capitalism, Dunayevskaya continued her study of the Hegelian dialectic by taking on a task the Johnson-Forest Tendency had set itself: exploring Hegel'sPhilosophy of Mind. She advanced an interpretation of Hegel's Absolutes holding that they involved a dual movement: a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and a movement from theory reaching to philosophy. She considered these 1953 letters to be "the philosophic moment" from which the whole development of Marxist Humanism flowed.

In 1953 Dunayevskaya moved to Detroit, where she was to live until 1984. In 1954-1955 she and C.L.R. James engaged in a split[clarification needed]. In 1955, she founded her own organization, News and Letters Committees, and a Marxist-Humanist newspaper, News & Letters, which remains in publication today. The newspaper covers women's struggles, the liberation of workers, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual rights and the disability rights movement, while not separating that coverage from philosophical and theoretical articles.

In the last year of her life she was working on a new book which she had tentatively titled, Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: The 'Party' and Forms of Organization Born Out of Spontaneity.[4]

Raya Dunayevskaya's speeches, letters, publications, notes, recordings and other items are located in the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit. Microfilm copies of the collection are available from the WSU Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. Guides to the collection are available from News and Letters Committees.

"He who glorifies theory and genius but fails to recognize the limits of a theoretical work, fails likewise to recognize the indispensability of the theoretician. All of history is the history of the struggle for freedom. If, as a theoretician, one's ears are attuned to the new impulse from the workers, new "categories" will be created, a new way of thinking, a new step forward in philosophic cognition." –from Marxism and Freedom[page needed]

"Precisely where Hegel sounds most abstract, seems to close the shutters tight against the whole movement of history, there he lets the lifeblood of the dialectic – absolute negativity – pour in. It is true Hegel writes as if the resolution of opposing live forces can be overcome by a mere thought transcendence. But he has, by bringing oppositions to their most logical extreme, opened new paths, a new relationship of theory to practice, which Marx worked out as a totally new relationship of philosophy to revolution. Today's revolutionaries turn their backs on this at their peril." –from Philosophy and Revolution[page needed]

"It is true that other post-Marx Marxists have rested on a truncated Marxism; it is equally true that no other generation could have seen the problematic of our age, much less solve our problems. Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx's concept of the philosophy of 'revolution in permanence.'" –from Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution[page needed]

Raya Dunayevskaya PapersWalter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan. The first portion of the collection exists as organized and donated by Ms. Dunayevskaya and relates to the development of Marxist-Humanism. The second portion was donated after Ms. Dunayevskaya’s death and relates her last writings and unfinished works. Documents range from 1924-1987.